Full Circle
by lara-surreality
Summary: Even ghosts deserve recognition.


**Full Circle**

by Lara  
December 2005

**Do not archive, translate or otherwise use this fic without permission.** You are welcome to link to this page.

This is a work of amateur fiction and does not intend to infringe on the rights of C.S. Friedman. No profit is being made.

The story is set right before the final chapter of CoS

Pairing: none

Alice once more was so kind and beta read this story

* * *

She stood on top of the ridge, at the beginning of the path leading back to the taverns and inns. A mere step beyond the line that marked the border between the relative, treacherous safety of humanity's realm and the plain of spirits and shadows, manifested from pain and fear. A border he had crossed easily, even though he knew better than most what waited in the mist. The shades of the dead could be banished; there was no great mystery to it when one could use the fae. He had nothing to fear here. 

And yet each step had cost him. Memories were harder to banish than shadows, and more than once he had been tempted to turn around and leave. But he couldn't have done that, not without regretting it for the rest of his life. So he had made his way past the spirits, had climbed up the slope of Shaitan, always mindful of deceptively stable ground hiding lava flows or just empty chambers. His sight revealed such obstacles, the differences in the currents plain to those who knew how to read them. The fae was volatile here, hot and untameable, but it still followed patterns he knew how to read.

He had stood at the lip of the crater, shivering with the heat from below on his face. Fire, down there, and he was still adjusting to the knowledge that he could now rule this force, though not in this place where the earth fae was too hot by far to Work.

The faint shine of metal had caught his eye then. A sword, half-covered in ashes. _His_ sword, and when he could bring himself to touch it he felt echoes of the last time he had held it. Echoes of pain and fear. Of desperation. Determination. And delight that he should taste such power.

For a moment he had stood still, sword in hand, eyes closed in remembrance. And he had thanked the God he had created, for allowing him to be here, alive and whole. The first in over nine hundred years, this prayer. He had made no promises, had made no attempts at explanations. But he had given thanks for his life, because he knew that by all rights he should no longer have been able to do so.

Then he had returned, only stopping once to look at a shred of fabric caught between jagged rocks, faded and torn. It looked familiar, and after searching his memory for a moment he remembered a shirt with a partially missing sleeve. Not his own, but another's. His next task, that, to pay old debts and to see whether new bargains might be struck.

She was waiting for him there, one step away from mankind's - living mankind's - domain. Pale and translucent, her gown bloodied, her face full of sorrow and fear and a spark of something he had not been able to read before because his very nature had denied its existence. A mere shadow of the woman he had once loved and cherished. Whom he had tortured and killed to strike his bargain with the Unnamed. He almost wished he were able to regret it. But her death had bought him life, and while he would have wished that there had been another way, he knew that it had been necessary. And so he did not repent, because to do so would belittle the importance and value of the sacrifice. Of her.

She watched him as he approached her, a silent spectator. Then, when he stopped before her, she raised a misty hand covered in a spidery web of blood. Touched his cheek while he fought to hold still.

Only for a moment cold, immaterial fingertips brushed against his skin, trailing along the scar marring his face, the reminder of the dark power he had sacrificed her to. Then she let her hand fall again and he thought that he saw regret in her eyes.

"It was worth it", he whispered. "I swear it, Almea. It was worth every moment."

She looked at him steadily and eventually she nodded. Stepping aside, she let him leave the realm of shadows. Back to Black Ridge Pass, to seek out a former priest and an attempt at new beginnings.


End file.
